Well, you all know that I’m a little leary of data and statistics from last class and here is the book that caused that scepticism. I’m not sure if this is one of the titles you offered up in class last week when I mentioned it Professor Sample.

The Manafactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools by David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle the book came out as a sort of response to the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report.

 So, now for the statistics – Teacher dropout rates http://www.districtadministration.com/pulse/commentpost.aspx?news=no&postid=49603 kind of interesting to see that a higher percetage of teachers “drop out” of the profession than students, but with all the contradictions that we have highlighted between our readings and our (often forced) practice not surprising.

I am completely on board with Graff’s assertion that we should use students ability to argue conversationally to teach agumentative writing. Unfortunately, the point about summarizing possible objections is not (or at least in my experience) not the easiest thing for students to do. I think a better approach would be to find students who have differing views on a subject and let them argue. Then use this experience as a type of prewriting. What I’ve found is that students need to have this type of emotional encounter in order to help develop their logical commentary.

As far as the talk about using templates – I think they are very good for struggling students and for giving an idea to all students what the teacher hopes will be created through the assignment, but it should be emphasized that students shouldn’t limit themselves to just the templates and be encouraged to move beyond just the confines of the template. Regardless, you’ll have those students who will always attempt to do the bare minimum and this is when the grading on an ability scale come into play. No matter how ‘unfair’ students and parents may say it is, if you know a student is capable of doing more they should be graded harder – it is our duty to push them to do their best and if a student is capable of more and we only grade them on the lowest of standards – are we really doing them any favors?

The point in Graff’s book that made me laugh out loud was the 1 st sentence of chapter 11 on Hidden Intellectualism – 3 semi-colon and 1 colon – yeah, my students wouldn’t be intimidated by a sentence. Truthfully, I’m a little intimidated by this sentence. Yet, in the chapter he talks about valuing street smarts – I don’t see too many people writing a sentence like this to explain the drawbacks to using a carberator as compared to fuel injection. I fully value street smarts; however, the educational system in which we raise our children does not. Programs that value these talents and smarts are being cut in order to pay the testing companies for prep materials to prepare students to take the tests purchased from the same testing companies.

Does anyone else see a proble with the fact that we don’t make anything in America anymore? Or with the fact that people like Graff who have ‘pie in the sky'(not content, but practicality within our current system) ideas about education haven’t actually been in a K-12 classroom for years if ever?

Okay,  so I know exactly what Renee is talking about. I breezed through high school without much trouble, but I did not learn what they wanted in college, nor did I learn how to study. When I started college, as an engineering major, I too had great difficulty because I wasn’t sure what was being asked or what was wanted and I didn’t know how to navigate the system. This is something I’ve also seen with some of my students who have gone to college as first generation college students.

This lack of understanding the expectations and the system is truly propagated by the system particularly in the Freshman and Sophomore levels when classes or study sessions are taught/lead by graduate assistants who typically have no teaching experience and expect you to sink or swim. I see it as a weeding out process. I still have not too fond memories of my Chemistry professor, who as Sarah pointed out in her post was in the position because of the money he brought into the University for his research, that did not have any office hours himself, showed up to lecture 3 times a week, and was not even present when tests were given. Our closest contact was our lab TA, and although he conducted study sessions prior to exams in addition to the running the lab section was much like one of those Chess geniuses that was mentioned in one of our first readings in that he did not connect with my level.

I truly applaude Graff’s intentions, but I am skeptical of it actually happening. Our whole educational system needs an overhaul and in my opinion it needs to happen from both ends: Colleges and Universities need to work from the top and Elementary schools need to work from the bottom and there needs to be a meeting in the middle. I do not pretend that I have the answers, but I think that it begins with a reoccuring theme in many of our readings: “The sheer cognitive overload represented by the American curriculum prevents most students from detecting and then learning the moves of the underlying arugment gmae that gives coherence to it all” (3). Once again, a mile wide and an inch deep.

Graff talks about the importance that has been placed on the college degree by society and the realization that high schools do not expect that all of their students will go on to college…the problem here is that even though the realization has been made as we talked about in class last week with the TED presentation – the money has been focused on preparing students to go to college so programs that would help prepare them for careers that do not require college and/or tech schools have been cut. This of course is because we rely on what the universities have told us they expect students to be able to do and this is what is focused on. Again the problem lies in the fact that there is no single answer – anyone ever look at the AP Biology or AP Chemistry curriculum – no way a student could learn all that or a teacher teach all of it successfully.

Then at the lower grades a focus needs to be placed on the ability to decipher…I cannot tell you how many times I’ve asked a student to tell me what they have just read into their own words and they are at a complete loss…I know we’ve discussed this in class before, but it goes back to only asking basic info questions that recall specific events or things and not meaning.

 The whole system is broken and I just wonder…are we perpetuating the problem?

In reading the articles in WWTTL, I found myself remembering a couple of my undergrad professors and thinking about how in the hell is this feasible in my current position. I am in agreement with Renee about wanting to do my writing in my classes, but the thought of having to read all the student work is a little too much to think about.

I has mixed feelings about Bloom’s attitude, but I do agree that having students write in the different genres gives them a taste of what it is like; however, I have never seen the intrinstic desire to revise that she writes about, nor the willingness to conference of which Glenn writes. I have and do give students the opportunity to mimic the writing of  stories that we have read in class with less than positive results. Unfortunately, many of my students do not take the time to do the assignment much the same as Lovitt’s students but instead of the night before it is due, it is the class period before it is due. The other aspect that I struggle with in these types of assignments is how do you teach studnets “the art of crafting an honest, engaging autobiography, not with confession for therapeutic purposes” (82). Even when they are not autobiographies this seems to happen. Recently, I had my students write 5 minute skits and everyone could tell who was upset with thier boyfriend, most of them played out like a scene of soap opera. On the otherhand there were some really good ones that delt with social issues like racial profiling, okay so maybe there was only 3 out of the 30 that weren’t carbon copies, but it was good for those 3 students, right?

Another gripe I had with Bloom was her statement about the students in her classes when she stated they “will become teachers of literature and, willy-nilly, of writing” (79). I’m not saying that this is a wrong assumption, but the fact that she is so matter of fact about it and does not seem to upset by this fact, nor does she seem to address this problem with a proposed solution. Again I ask, when is it assumed that writing is taught?

On a positive side of things – I found Glenn’s oral presentations to be a helpful idea. I had an undergrad professor who taught Native American Literature who required us to do this type of assignment. We were to research one topic (we signed up at the beginning of the semester with appropriate due dates) write a one page paper with enough copies for the entire class and then present our findings. Each topic tied into what we were studing/reading for that class and it really did bring the lecture aspect/responsibility to the students. In fact, I still find some of those papers that other students wrote useful for teaching certain pieces of literature.

I guess what is really important in all the reading about teaching we do in these types of classes is that we realize different things work for different people. Sometimes we might find something that will work well with our teaching style that will benefit all of our students and other times we may find a strategy that will help that one student who is lagging behind. Just with everything else in life as Swift reminds us with his “Modest Purposal” there is no one solution to all the problems that exist the same is true of teaching, and we as teachers must not get so engrossed in the dancing shadows that we forget they are only shadows.

As I started my journey through the pages of Scholes, I was interested. True, it was a much more theoretical text, but it has been awhile since I’ve been able to contort my brain into his way of thinking. I was fine with all the binary oppositions that he set up in the beginning pages, and I was on board with the need to rebuild the ‘English apparatus’. Then, I found myself questioning him and disagreeing with more than I agreed with, and then I agreed with him, scratched my head, screamed and threw the book across the room, had a drink, went to bed, got up and tried it again with only marginally better results.

I enjoyed his humor at times, like when he said, “Milton’s Mammon not too long ago materialized as our Secretary of the Interior” (14). I can only imagine given the publication date that he is refering to Donald P. Hodel…I giggled.

I applauded him when he stated that, “We must…ask[ing] what we mean when we proclaim ourselves teachers of literature” (11), and that “we must stop ‘teaching literature’ and start ‘studying texts'”(16). However, I realize that he has the priviledge of having an office in that Ivory Tower, and can live in the theoretical world postulating about what ‘we’ (don’t you love the use of the Royal ‘We’) must do. Then I almost lost it when he so nonchalantly states, “In our hypothetical introductory course, we cannot expect our students to read widely in any single author, but the process can at least be enacted by a teacher who had read widely and makes the fruits of this reading availabel to the class for thier use, rather than hoarding them up to enrich some superior, teacherly display” (51). Only four pages after saying, “We, as teachers, may or may not wish to trouble our students about this theoretical dispute, but we will have to make up our minds about our own positions in it, simply in order to decide whether to make this material available or conceal it”(47). Persumably, if we are going to make it available, it will be in some ‘superior, teacherly display’.

Oh, I could continue on for hours, but I shan’t bore you any longer expect to say the following.

I did like what Scholes had to say about ‘studying texts’ instead of ‘teaching literature’; however, the ‘English Apparatus’ is a huge machine that has only been strengthend within the walls of testing army (I’m speaking primarily of K-12 education), and it takes a lot of courage to stand up against those forces, especially within the design of the current system. For example, even though I have 7 years of teaching experience since I have not been teaching in my present county for 3 years, I have to turn in weekly lesson plans for review. Mostly, I’m trusted and they only get a cursery look; however, when they do get looked at more thoroughly, I get questions like, ‘when are you teaching…’, or ‘why haven’t you covered…’. Persumably, knowledge that will be covered on the oh so important test. Now, there are teachers who have less experience than I do, but since they have been in the county for three years they don’t have to turn in lesson plans. However, they’ve been following the ‘teaching for the test paradigm’ since they first walked into the classroom, so that’s what they do because there isn’t a lot of emphasis put on reflective practice once you step into the classroom. This in turn leads to the students’ ‘school behavior’ where they want the answers and they don’t want to ‘study the text’. I face this with my students constantly, many of them are starting to come around, but still some of them wonder why we haven’t blazed through as many texts as the other classes and why I ‘never tell them the answer and make them figure it out for themselves’ or ‘why did Ms. so and so say it meant…’.

 Alright, seriously, I’m done now.

In going back and reading my posts, I had many of the same insights that have already been written. However, since I doubt any of you are psychic I’ll go ahead and write my post do that you don’t have to keep wondering about the commonalities . This brings me to the first commonality – narcissism in the same ways that Sara and Laurel have already mentioned. Most posts do indicate that I like to talk about myself and that I wrtie about what I like and that this is what the class must want to hear about.  My insights regarding this are:

1- Of course I’m going to write about myself because this is what I ‘know’ and I see the purpose of this class as giving me new information to think about and analyze with what I ‘know’ and then create deeper meanings and understandings thus altering what I ‘knew’ and creating a new personal knowledge. One of the ways the thinking and analyzing takes place is through these blog posts. As William Zinsser says (along with many others in different ways), “Writing is thinking on paper.” 

2- Going along with insight #1, without direction we all focus on what we like or find interesting or challenging. In fact, only in the very first post did I actually incorporate all of the readings and that was we were given the loose directions of commenting on the readings and looking for how they might intersect.

Another aspect that has received many mentions and comments is the ‘blogging voice’. For myself personally, I really haven’t had much problem just logging on and rambling on (I like the sound keystrokes make). I feel that this is due to my previous experience (talking about myself again). As a student I have often been required to take part in a weekly blog or discussion post type exercise therefore I do not find it new, nor do I fear not sounding too academic. This is because in none of the previous experiences has that been an expectation. I also require that my students reply to a weekly blog discussion; however, I do have an expectation that they use Standard Written English. Which I explain to them as meaning they should write in complete sentences and not use texting abbreviations when posting; however, I do tell them that I do not necessarily expect to see their ideas fully developed on the blog post as this is a place for them to get their thoughts out and hopefully get feedback from their classmates.

Continuing along with this ‘blogging as thinking’ idea, I also see some disjointedness about my posts when reading them as the non-author. I also experience this with my writing when I re-read 1st drafts. I realize that there are things that I’ve said that I understand the flow and how one idea follows another, but in re-reading I see how someone else may not be able to follow my train of thought. This is also something I see in my students’ writing. However, for many of them it continues through to the final draft because they cannot comprehend why someone couldn’t follow what they meant.

In addressing the final question of the reflecting on reflecting blog, I would have to say the thing that I value most about the weekly blogging is that it gives me that chance to reflect on what we’ve read/talked about in class and think about how it influences/affects my classroom practice. Sometimes I get inspired to try something new and other times I just get affirmation about what I’m already doing, but regardless, I get an excuse to take the time to just reflect. I also really enjoy reading what the rest of you have posted because I get ideas from your words and affirmation in your thoughts as well.

Okay, so I have to agree with Sara, most of Blau was preaching to my choir as well. I share many of Blau’s takes on the teaching of literature and it would seem many of yours judging on the posts that I have read. Alright, I’m going to apologize ahead of time because I cannot remember who said what in thier posts. Background experience has a great deal with how we handle and approach all the situations in our lives. The mention to “My Papa’s Waltz” and how students of the 80s jumped to interpretations of  abuse rings very true with my own experience. Someone had mentioned the idea of practice before theory and then there was the story about going to the optomotrist. I too was very unsure of what I was doing when I started teaching, especially since I was teaching on the Navajo Nation Indian reservation and had no teaching experience or education background – just an undergraduate degree in English and that took me 10 years of life experience to gain. (While I was teaching on a ‘substandard license’ I earned my M.A.T. in Secondary Education and got loaded down with pedagogy.) So, I approached teaching literature in the same way it had been taught to me in high school – read and answer the questions in the book (YUK!) and we all know what our students do and what we did most of the time – scan for the answers and get done as fast as we can.

What was different about my situation when I started teaching was that I was teaching about 20 students in a self-contained environment ranging from 14-21 years of age and I was thier only teacher. There were computer based modules for them to work on and such in order for them to earn the credits required for graduation, but since I had them all day, every day I incorported class lessons rather than relying solely on the computer based work, which made me more of a manager than a teacher. Long story short – I had that moment when I began questioning why I was doing what I was doing when my students questioned me about our study of literature. When they told me it was boring, I couldn’t understand why they would think like that – I loved literature. Upon reflection, I realized that when we studied literature it was really the only thing that was read and answer, even history had hands on components or games, but there was no critical inquiry with the literature. This is when I started thinking about my college experiences and the discussions we had about the literature and how there were no ‘answers’ just discussions and questions and debates and how I enjoyed these even though there rarely was a resolution everyone could agree upon. After this ah ha moment, I started to take my time with the literature and question the students and have them discuss and act out scenes (one year a group staged the blinding of the cyclops from the Odyssey complete with fake blood oozing from the eye – gross but effective in making the describtions real. Last year, I had students who staged the fight scene between Romeo and Tybalt as Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.) What I found that when students could connect to what they are reading it added vaule for them and they were more engaged and willing to learn. But different students connect differently, but rarely is the deeper connection fostered through the read and answer questions that happens in too many classrooms.

Yes, I too agree that lecturing has a place in the Literature classroom (typically in the defining of terms that are necessary to know for testing, or at least that is what happens in my classroom most often). I too had a wonderful lecturer who made epic poetry come alive. Professor Phillip Holt is to be credited with my love of the Iliad, the Aneid, and the Divine Comedy simply because of the passion he brought to the topic. As with Mrs. Lyons, Professor Holt did not preach his interpretation, he explained, modeled and accepted other possible interpretations based on textual support. He also encouraged none ‘academic’ work to illustrate understanding at times with assignment choices that allowed for students to create their own level in purgatory. What is unique about Professor Holt and Mrs. Lyons and numerous other teachers who make their lectures come alive and engage students is that they are lecturing their passion. I know when I cover certain works in my classroom, I am much more engaged then when I teach others which is the point I feel that Blau is trying make for the audience he is addressing. As we know, audience is one of the key components that determines what and how we write, and I feel that Blau is writing for an audience of beginning and novice teachers who are still trying to find their strides or negotiate how to teach ‘required’ texts.

Teaching is more art than science, there are no one size fits all solutions and anyone who trys to tell you that there are is selling hog wash, as such what works for someone may or may not work for someone else; or what works for one text may not work for another, but sticking with the same thing without producing results is just insanity.

Admittedly, it was late when I sat down to read the articles on New Criticism and Reader-Response, but I have a background in literary theory and criticism (although it has been several years since I have practically applied any of this background), yet these were very difficult articles to follow – insert tab A into slot Z – wait a minute where is slot Z – oh it is hidden in the Eliot paragraphs.

It also made me remember my Modern Poetry seminar class. I had a professor who was a New Critic, and although it pained me, I did learn a great deal about the practice of close reading from him. However, I did have many headaches upon leaving his class because all of the butting of heads we did over interpretations of poems read/discussed. In fact, his class more than any other turned me off of the idea that there is one single solitary interpretation of a poem or prose for that matter (yes, even nonfiction).  This may seem contradictory – taught me a lot about close reading – turned me off of single interpretations. Well, at one point in my life, I fancied myself a poet – and as such I took many poetry/writing workshops. It was in one of these workshops that I first heard someone’s recycled words (because in actuality there are on original words or stories – we’re just telling the same story differently – right?) that as a poet/writer as soon as you put your work out there – you lose all control of meaning – people are going to apply their own meaning even if it is not your intended meaning. How can we as poets/writers stop this? We can’t, but we can infuse our work with diliberate choices to help guide our readers to our intended meaning, but ultimately they may not reach that meaning, and may reach an equally significant meaning we hadn’t thought of. I feel Crosman brings this to light in his discussion of Pound’s In a Station of the Metro.

What can differentiate a poems meaning? Well, our experience will definitely influence our understanding of a literary work as well as our beliefs. How many wars have been fought over interpretations of the Bible? Without an understanding or at least a little bit of knowledge of Homer’s Odyssey, or that Ulysses is the Roman equivalent would they come away with the same interpretation of Tennyson’s poem? I do not think so, especially considering some of the specfic vocabulary choices like lees(7).

For me, all of this points to a more reader as meaning maker approach. However, I still feel that there are some gaps in the article on Reader-Response theory because I felt like it was saying that an interpretation is only as good as the interpreter’s interpretation fits with his/her groups intretative guidelines. My feelings are that these guidelines must not be static and should change depending on what we are reading and when in our lives we are reading.

 Just a couple of comments because my school’s firewall will not let me post comments to other’s posts:

Renee – I agree that questions in the book are of little more value than elementary recall and paraphrase. However, textbook makers are publisihing for a large audience and are limited in their knowledge of the knowledge of individual teachers and/or students. I typically use them as starting points to get the discussion rolling. However, as Edith mentioned in class some textbooks include those open ended questions (like the Norton – in our discussion about Cathedral) with no answers – better questions – but sometimes more frustrating.

Edith – Your comment about the meaning being created between the writer and reader – I agree, but what about cases like Emily Dickinson who ‘apparently’ wrote for only herself? We as readers find a great deal of meaning in her poems, but when no audience is indicated how is the meaning created? More questions than answers – isn’t that always the case.

Franciso – There is a certain allure to having only 1 right answer – I have several students who will attest to this fact.

There was much that I enjoyed about the readings this week; however, I think the most impressive quality to me was the circular nature of the work. As in the action research process the work presented in these posters is not finished…it has been presented as findings and is the beginning of the next cycle. I feel that too often in educational research what happens is that the research is done, the findings are published, and then the public accepts published findings as the truth; so if you as an educator do not achieve success through the implementation of said findings, well you must have done something wrong.

As has been mentioned earlier, Randy Bass’s work even included that reflective piece for the oral mid-term and final. Much in the same way as the readers were scattered and non-leaner, so are our thought processes (again as has already been mentioned), so why shouldn’t we allow our students the opportunity to explain their thinking and their answers. Besides as we all know if we give students questions to answer about a reading they will just hunt and scan until they find what they think is the right answer and then write down what they find. Or worse, they will have a friend that will allow them to just copy down their answers. More often than not, they both get the wrong answer in this situation.

Having had a great deal of exposure to below grade level and struggling readers in my first five years of teaching, I have been exposed to a great deal of professional development and course work on reading. Therefore, I have employed many techniques in which I expect students to interact with the text. In honesty, nothing makes them more angry – at first – then when I don’t just give them questions to answer. One of the strategies that I have found to be most effective is a double-entry journal. Through the use of double-entry journals, we will read a text together identifying and commenting on the basic elements of the story (setting, character, plot, themes, etc.) This is done through modeling with me keeping a journal on the overhead for them to copy down. As the year progresses, I ask for them to include more and more in their double-entry journals and provide them with less and less support. Although they do a great deal  of belly aching and whining everytime I respond that ‘yes’ they will be keeping a reading journal, without fail it is the one thing the majority of them will write about at the end of the year as being the most helpful thing they have done in class throughout the year.

Although I provide a great deal of support for my Gen. Ed. classes through reading journals, I do not give as much support to my AP students. This is one of the areas that I struggle with because even though many of the students are at a higher level, not all of them have the same skills entering the class. The sad truth of the matter is that many of them are only taking AP classes to get out of the Gen. Ed. classes because there is no middle ground opportunity. So long story short – I know that there is more that I could be doing for my Gen. Ed. populations, but I feel like I’m making headway there; however, it is the lower end of the spectrum students in my AP classes that I feel are slipping threw the cracks.

 Sorry, I feel as if I’ve droned on about what I do in this post rather than about the readings. One thing that I have done with my AP students as an extra credit assignment was the creation of a MySpace network for the characters of the Iliad and what the VKP readings gave me the idea of is kind of an expansion on this idea to a research project that we going to be doing as part of an individual book project.

 Okay, okay, enough…talk about non-linear posting. I’m really just stream of consciousness blogging here so I’ll come back when I have something relevant to write.

Here is the literary narrative poem I mentioned in class.

“A Study of Reading Habits”

When getting my nose in a book

Cured most things short of school,

It was worth ruining my eyes

To know I could still keep cool,

And deal out the old right hook

To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,

Evil was just my lark:

Me and my cloak and fangs

Had ripping times in the dark.

The women I clubbed with sex!

I broke them up like meringues.

Don’t read much now: the dude

Who lest the girl down before

The hero arrives, the chap

Who’s yellow and keeps the store,

Seem far took familiar. Get stewed:

Books are a load of crap.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Edith, I too had difficulty with The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. True it was not in itself a difficult text, but I would have liked to have had some more information regarding the authors’ students and some more quantifiable data regarding those students’ performance. It could have also been about half as long. By the time I got to the “Intermezzo”, I had the idea. Some of what the authors bring to light is interesting and I plan to employ the “Difficulty Papers” with my next unit as my students are beginning work on Hamlet. I, however, was less than impressed with their use of three column notes – they just did not seem intuitive. I have used two and three column notes both as a teacher and a student and found them to be useful tools, but I just did not care for their passing reference to them at the end of each chapter, nor for their textual layout in the first chapter. For me, I found them more confusing than helpful.

I did enjoy the chapter “How Experts Differ from Novices”. Although I was also outraged at some of the information provided. I mean, I did not find a source cited with a date after 1997 (Yes, I realize that they book was published in 1999) and yet we have not seen many changes in our educational system. The “mile wide and an inch deep” curricula still exist. Not to mention the fact that little is being done about conditionalizing the knowledge that is being taught in our classrooms, and Whitehead noted that this leads to “inert” or useless information back in 1929. (I had said a lot more on this point before my computer crashed, but I now realize that it was useless fluff and will not go through the process of trying to reconstruct it now.)

The other point that I got a kick out of in this chapter was key principle #5 – just because you’re an expert doesn’t mean that you can teach what you know. A key example of this is one of my best friends Eric. Arguably the most intelligent person I have ever met. He became great at teaching the undergraduates at M.I.T. but not so wonderful at imparting lasting knowledge to his students at a highly under funded, ill-equipped high school on the Navajo Nation. He tried, but he just couldn’t bring his mind down to the level that it needed to be at to converse with his students.

“Cathedral” is an amazingly complex, simply difficult story seeped in religious symbolism.

So, how do all these reading intersect? Well, as I see it, it goes something like this. The book chapter reminds us that we are experts and that we have spent a lot more time than our students getting to the point that we are as readers. We don’t always remember how it was that when it rains in a story that we are on the look out for a cleansing, or why we automatically begin to think old age if the season is fall, or why we expect that the sighted character is actually going to learn that they are ‘blind’ in someway through their interaction with a blind character. It is a lot like being able to recall the chess moves, it just happens with all the practice that we have gotten. The book on difficulty serves to remind us that texts are difficult and we need to 1) remember this about them and 2) listen to our students when they tell us that they find them difficult. And not just to the fact they are difficult, but why they are difficult – this gives us as teachers the opportunity to differentiate, to meet every learner at his or her level and help them work through the difficulty and then show them how to work through these difficulties on their own. And lastly, “Cathedral” gives an example of the practice in action. The narrator is trying to teach Robert what a cathedral looks like, but is at a lose for how to accomplish this task until he listens to his student who gives the ‘teacher’, the tools necessary to teach him. The end result – they both learn, and I would argue that the narrator learns the most.